At the Precipice

Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis

Shearer Davis Bowman

Publication Year: 2010

The third volume in the Littlefield series, this manuscript by Dave Bowman follows (chronologically) Liz Varon's Disunion!, which dealt with the long process of separation of the two regions and its roots in the Constitutional and Federal periods. Bowman's study takes readers into the secession crisis itself, examining the thoughts and actions of key individuals including Lincoln, Buchanan, Davis, Tyler, Van Buren and others. In focusing on major figures from the period and their interactions, Bowman sets his work apart from those that view the crisis through the lenses of major forces, events, and developments. This approach provides especially keen insight into what Americans North and South on the eve of the Civil War believed and thought about themselves and the political, social, and cultural worlds in which they lived, and how their assumptions and thoughts informed their actions and decisions.

Cover Art

Frontmatter

Contents

1 Introduction and Overview

When did the secession crisis that precipitated the Civil War
begin? More broadly, when began the longer era of antebellum
sectional conflict that culminated in the secession
crisis and then Civil War? Some historians see the beginning...

2 Slaveholders and Slaves, State’s Rights and Revolution

As of 1860, the future Confederate president, Jefferson Davis,
owned well over a hundred African American slaves in Warren
County, Mississippi. One historian has described Mississippi
as “the most southern of southern states—a prototype
where is mixed all the peculiar forces...

3 Honor and Degradation: Section, Race, and Gender

In 1860, Charles Colcock Jones Jr., age twenty- eight, became
the youngest man ever elected mayor of Savannah,
Georgia, a victory his father termed “a high honor.”
Charles Sr. used the word “honor” according to its funda-fundamental...

4 The Second Party System and Its Legacy: The Careers of John Bell, John C. Breckinridge, Howell Cobb, Stephen A. Douglas, John Tyler, and Martin Van Buren

The era of the second American party system, which extended
from the mid- 1820s into the mid- 1850s, warrants
extended discussion in any analysis of the late antebellum
years and the secession crisis. The leaders of the Republican...

5 Jefferson Davis, Horace L. Kent, and the Old South

Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, like most political
leaders in the Lower or Cotton South, began the secession
winter of 1860–61 as a hesitant disunionist but came to
endorse the decision to quit the Union as regrettable but
necessary. He hoped that the U.S...

6 Abraham Lincoln, Henry Waller, and the Free- Labor North

When Abraham Lincoln began to appear to be a serious contender
for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination,
the editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, sent
reporter Jon Locke Scripps to the Illinois state capital,
Springfield, to gather information...

Private diaries, at least those not subsequently edited by
the diarist with a view to publication, are more likely to
offer genuinely candid expressions of the author’s feelings
and judgments at the moment than are letters and
speeches composed by politicians...

8 President Buchanan, the Crittenden Compromise, President Lincoln, and Fort Sumter

Age sixty-six at his election in 1856, James Buchanan was,
in the words of Jean H. Baker, “almost as old as the United
States, a point of pride throughout his life.” Few presidents
in American history have drawn on such long and varied
experience in Washington...

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